Mount Ganos & Uçmakdere

In Old Turkish, the word “uçmak” meant paradise; when someone died, people said they had “reached uçmak”. So why is the village on the slope where Mount Ganos plunges steeply into the sea called Uçmakdere? Perhaps the people of old likened this stream valley to a piece of paradise… Today, though, the name has gained an entirely different meaning: the paragliders leaping from the village’s slopes are doing uçmak in its modern sense, quite literally flying. It can’t often happen that two meanings of one word meet on the same slope.